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A year ago, Swantje Lichtenstein and Tom Lingnau asked a number of artists a simple question: Is the artist necessary for making art today? What became a slim volume of answers began with their project Covertext, which investigates literary conceptualism and appropriation. It was in this context that they first questioned what connection remains between artist and artwork – for if conceptual literature takes the idea to be more important than its execution, and if the pure appropriation and copying of other people’s texts no longer constitutes “creation” in the classical sense, the idea of authorship has indeed reached an impasse, because its relation to the work becomes fleeting and elusive: Who is the author of a book that was written written by someone else? Think Borges’s Pierre Menard.

Behind the scenes the bot is looking up what people search for on Google at the moment (Google trends) and tries to match relevant sentences for a topic on Twitter. Most of the times the pieces of text are news headlines, occasionally spam or deliberately spread disinformation.

A version of this essay was included in the program accompanying Gregor Weichbrodt’s salon at Room & Board on October 29, 2015. Julia Pelta Feldman is the director of Room & Board, an artist’s residency in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Gregor Weichbrodt recently visited a friend’s apartment in Berlin, the city where he lives (a short train ride from Potsdam, where he was born). He knew that this friend often hosts international guests, but Weichbrodt, finding the apartment’s contents labeled with their own names, was nonetheless struck by a feeling of disorientation. Der Kühlschrank on the refrigerator; die Wand on the wall: of course, these words were there to help visitors learn German, but for Weichbrodt, a native speaker, the experience had a surreal quality: the redundant explanations served to estrange him from these familiar, domestic things.

On Friday, hidden away in the West Village, one block from the Hudson, the very necessary School for Poetic Computation showcased a quickly growing branch of digital literature: bot poetry. The event had been organized last minute by Allison Parrish to make up for Darius Kazemi’s official bot summit that was put off until next year.

I am happy to see that my On the Road project has been transformed into a stage performance by Michael Durkin and the people from 14th Street in Philadelphia at Plays & Players theater. Details about the show can be found here. The complete performance can be viewed on Youtube here. More shows are about to come.

Many works on 0x0a have as their starting point gigantic collections of texts, called corpora. You can easily compile such a corpus by yourself via the method of “web scraping.” For the 0x0a text “Chicken Infinite” – a 532-page recipe – the text corpus consisted of cooking instructions gathered from the internet. The tool for doing this was Kimono, a web scraper I would like to introduce today.

Kimono by kimonolabs offers a user-friendly method for grabbing the contents of websites in a structured way. Without needing to know anything about programming, you can compile enormous collections of texts. This service is especially useful when websites do not offer APIs, that is, interfaces with which one can gather data directly (as does Twitter). Instead, you build your own API with Kimono, and get as output a JSON, RSS, or CSV file that contains the text from the particular website.

0x0a

0x0a is the hex code for the line feed. It is a symbol that does not have an analogue in the analog. It cannot be pronounced and exists only as “control character.” It is thus the ideal symbol for the attempt to produce genuinely Digital Literature. 0x0a strives to be a workshop, a laboratory, a showcase and a focal point for digital conceptual literature. We want to start the discussion about this form of literature in Germany and beyond.